Taming Cloud Costs with Infracost

Combining cloud infrastructure with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform offers the flexibility to create resources on demand, but accurately estimating cloud costs remains a challenge due to the complex and ever-changing pricing structures of cloud providers. Infracost, an open-source tool, addresses this issue by providing real-time cost estimates for cloud infrastructure changes, helping users understand and manage their spending. Available as a VSCode extension and a command-line tool, Infracost integrates with Terraform to parse configurations and produce cost breakdowns, which can be visualized directly in the IDE or as comments in pull requests, enhancing transparency in CI/CD workflows. The tool also offers a paid Infracost Cloud version that includes features like Slack integration, FinOps policies, and custom price books to prevent budget overruns. Infracost's ability to enforce spending policies using Open Policy Agent (OPA) ensures cost control by halting CI/CD pipelines if expenditures exceed predefined limits, making it an essential addition to automated deployment processes for avoiding unexpected cloud expenses.